Compared the effectiveness of English instruction at an Austrian immersion school and a regular Austrian high school. Immersion students showed the highest levels of English proficiency and also outperformed regular high school students in French, suggesting that in addition to language learning experience, further factors such as aptitude,…

During the first half of the twentieth century in British Columbia, French language was considered a school subject to be taught as any other using formal classical approaches. Generally, no specific provincial or local policies existed to guide how French was taught and learned. By 1981, however, British Columbia had developed explicit language…

In contrast to other volumes on language immersion programs that have discussed language outcomes, this book focuses on how teachers and school administrators implement and carry on the daily operations of immersion schooling. It chronicles a 2-year research project that involved the staff and principals of two immersion schools in the midwest, in…

This study examined the strategies that 12 kindergarten and first-grade French immersion students in Ontario developed for oral communication and the contexts of such communication. Over the course of the school year each student was videotaped once a month in various classroom settings. The transcriptions of student conversations and utterances…

Research on the language development of children in immersion programs has uncovered a certain amount of data. Immersion students have less well developed productive skills than their francophone peers and passive receptive skills which approach those of francophones. Error analysis studies have found that immersion students reach a plateau in…

A synthesis of two evaluation studies is presented. The first study describes an early immersion school-based program in the province of British Columbia conducted on a longitudinal basis from kindergarten to grade 7, and sponsored by parents to extend their children's school-based bilingual experience. The longitudinal study of the early…

The effectiveness of the Chicago Mastery Learning Reading (CMLR) Program implemented in Ontario's Kettleby Public Schools (KPS) was measured by the students' reading progress and comparisons with the progress of other students in French immersion (FI) and other non-FI programs, including a gifted program. Within six months of CMLR implementation,…

In a study of the relative importance native speakers of French attach to different types of errors produced by second language learners, 231 native French speakers listened to 50 pairs of deviant sentences to determine which sentence in each pair contained a more serious error. The sentences contained 20 different types of errors grouped into…

The modified American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Educational Testing Service (ACTFL/ETS) oral proficiency scale was developed in response to a request from the New Brunswick (Canada) Department of Education for assistance in comparing the results of its French immersion and core programs. Because the existing ACTFL/ETS academic…

A study was conducted to assess the French language proficiency of grade 10 and grade 11 students from three different French immersion programs: early, grade 7, and grade 7/8 immersion. English and French control groups were included in the study. The results indicate that: (1) the three immersion groups scored significantly higher than the…

This study examines the occurrence of transfer in the simultaneous acquisition of French and Hebrew by 57 native English-speaking children in a primary grades French/Hebrew immersion program in Montreal. The study focuses on three issues: (1) whether transfer of genetically related first and second languages differs quantitatively and…

This publication, an update of previous reports of the same title, provides information on language programs in Canada under the following headings: (1) programs in the nine provinces (excluding Quebec) including a description of minority language and second language education as well as French immersion programs; and (2) programs in Quebec,…

Background on the current status of English and French as a second language (ESL, FSL) and English as a second dialect (ESD) programs in Ontario is provided by questionnaire responses, interviews and a review of pertinent literature. The author concludes that declining enrollment will jeopardize ESL/D and French immersion programs. Reduction in…

The school performance of pupils in grades 2-4 of the French immersion program in operation in the Ottawa-Carleton public schools is evaluated in comparison with the performance of those in the regular English program. The results indicate that by the end of grade 2, pupils in the immersion program show the same level of cognitive development as…

The school performance of pupils in grades 1-3 of the French immersion program in operation in Ottawa public schools is evaluated in comparison with that of pupils in the regular English program. The results indicate that by the end of grade 1 immersion program pupils taught reading in French are found to lag behind their peers in the regular…